Review/Music; 'The Beggar's Opera,' An 18th-Century Satire

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: May 10, 1990

The Ten Ten Players, a flexible company that has been resident at the Park Avenue Christian Church (1010 Park Avenue, at 85th Street) since 1955, presents everything from classic theater to contemporary satire, with occasional forays into musicals and light opera. Its current production, ''The Beggar's Opera,'' mixes several of those genres.

The production, directed by David Dunn Bauer, is an adroit, faithful staging of the 1728 John Gay comedy, with economical sets by Wendy Ponte, attractive costumes by Richard Guier and Baroque choreography by Alan Tjaarda Jones. There were some distinct deficits in the vocal department on Saturday evening. But the production affords considerable pleasure in most other ways. It is running weekends through May 26.

Gay wrote the work more as an anti-opera than an opera, one of its attractions to its 18th-century London public being its lampooning of the Italian opera style and the English public's fascination with it. Other more topical barbs - satirical references to the public corruption and private foibles of Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, for example - have lost their pointedness. But if the work's specificity has faded, the character types are still familiar enough to have served Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill well in their transformation of the piece into ''The Threepenny Opera.''

The work's greatest delight is its music. Since Gay was a satirist, not a composer, he set his verses to more than 60 well-known tunes of the day, some sampled only in brief snippets, others offered in extensive settings. Several of the tunes were filched from known composers - Purcell, Handel and Clarke among them. But most are sweet, simple ballads, folk songs, fiddle tunes and dances.

As such they survive modest voices nicely, and that's a good thing because a majority of this production's cast show only the most rudimentary ability to hold a tune. There were exceptions, the most notable being Judith Jarosz, who applied a lovely, well-shaped soprano to Polly Peachum's airs. David Fuller, while more variable, had a generally firm grasp on Captain Macheath's music. And one could ascribe Agnes Anne Fliss's shrillness to that aspect of the character she played, Lucy Lockit, Polly's rival for Macheath's affections.

Also appealing, in an anti-operatic way, were some of the ensembles. Macheath's gang, for example, sang with the imperfect intonation and rough-hewn energy one hears on early Pogues records - a sound that seemed perfect in this context. And the whores' chorus was equally vibrant and better blended.

However inconsistent its singing was, for the most part the troupe handled its dramatic tasks with finely understated comic assurance. Jeffery D. Eiche as Lockit, Jeff Shoemaker as Peachum and Leslie Shreve as Mrs. Diana Trapes gave particularly strong performances, as did Mr. Fuller and Miss Jarosz.

The production is accompanied by a small, expert orchestra, conducted by N. Thomas Pedersen. And although the program duly credits Gay's contemporary John Christopher Pepusch as the music's arranger, only a trace of Pepusch's score has survived. For this production, the music was reconstructed in a convincing period style by Jonathan Dobin, the ensemble's harpsichordist.